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Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

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Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#71

Post by fian »

ravenstine wrote: post #27
taftster wrote: post #23

I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…

I've been coming to a similar conclusion. Increasingly I've had to use `site: ` syntax with DDG, but DDG has clearly become significantly worse in recent months. This was confirmed by others in another HN thread recently. Even if I use the site-syntax or use quotes to specify exact match (which DDG used to honor), I'll often get nonsense results whereas Yandex somehow manages to find results that aren't on DDG or Goo…

In the past Google appeared to better honour advanced searches using boolean operators. You could add operators to narrow a search quite effectively.

From my experience, they have diluted that functionality in favour of keyword and context matching against popular searches. Often the thing I want to find is not the most popular thing. Breaking out of that and the search bubbles you get associated with is becoming increasingly difficult. I find myself more and more clicking past the first page if results hoping what I want is there just with less SEO. Rarely is there anything relevant beyond page 3. I definitely remember sometimes digging multiple pages deep into the search results and still finding useful information.

In the early days of Google the speed at which you got the search results was a major factor, I remember being surprised at the speed of response and the quality of the results the first time I was introduced to Google. They still include the search time at the top of the results.

I would prefer to regain strict boolean logic in search at the cost of increased search time. I often care more about actually finding what I want than how fast the result can be returned.

Maybe something like the default search works as it does today as it gives a fast result that has a high likelihood will contain what most people want to see. Then allow for advanced search that strictly adheres to the search terms but could take a few minutes to return the results.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#72

Post by sulam »

taftster wrote: post #56
kyrra wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googler, opinions are my own. For products that are core, large UI changes tend to just annoy a lot of users, unless there's something really amazing about the change. Even then, people are hesitant to like new UIs. Engineers and designers definitely want to try new things, but balancing those against messing with UIs that a billion+ people use is hard. My general take on drive and calendar, if they are trying to imp…

It's not "large" UI changes that are needed. (I mean, they are needed, the current google UI for most of their products sucks). But it's small improvements that make the big difference. A small user interface element added or removed to speed up an interaction. An updated user experience so that data can be found or organized in a slightly different way. I could pick on almost everyone of Google's products and have g…

I don’t think it’s that per se, for instance Meet has been innovating in small ways to the point where I believe it’s way better than Zoom. But not all Google tools are innovating at the same rate.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#73

Post by richardsocher »

gnicholas wrote: post #63
richardsocher wrote: post #49

This is one of the many problems we're trying to tackle at you.com (full disclosure, I work there). We felt like it's important that you can select your preferred sources and downvote sources you don't like. For this and other reasons we separate the experience into a private and personalized mode. So you get exactly what you want based on your explicit settings (like StackOverflow code snippets or arxiv papers) and…

What's the business model, currently and in the long run? Also, is this built on top of another search engine's results?

Hey. We will work on it together with the community this year.

Private mode is even more private than DDG so we will likely have to do private ads just like them.

But for the personalized experience we have a few ideas that I think are more creative and more aligned with users and privacy but not fully fleshed out yet. We're still a very small team but hoping to ship them this quarter.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#74

Post by SnowflakeOnIce »

I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#75

Post by rhizome »

I would like to see a search engine like Google, except without paywalled content, without PDFs, without whitepages.com type results in name searches, and without store product pages for items that are out of stock. A lot of that is repackaged public content, so the fact that they're duplicative should be a very strong negative signal. Relegate those pages to a DMOZ/Yahoo model.

I think that would take care of 90% of my frustrations. PDFs are the only questionable item there, I think, but invariably they should be on a research search site or converted to text...or even penalizing the sites that only supply PDF menus for restaurants and PDF manuals for plain consumer items.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#76

Post by richardsocher »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #62

I stopped using Google search (and most of their services) about three years ago. I used DDG for a while, but I was not convinced. Bing is average, not as good as Google once was, far from it in fact, but more relevant than the duck and less annoying than Google. But yeah, search is in a bad state.

Would love to hear your thoughts on you.com We're trying to innovate on various aspects of search, design, UX, AI, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#78

Post by kfrzcode »

kyrra wrote: post #50
l0b0 wrote: post #16

It's a trend I've noticed with other services, notably Drive and Calendar - they no longer innovate, just get a UI tweak every few years. It's very reminiscent of cash cows, which typically are resourced to just keep going at minimal expense for as long as possible. Another possibility is that the product isn't "sexy" anymore, so they are having trouble finding the great staff they need to stay at the forefront. This…

Googler, opinions are my own. For products that are core, large UI changes tend to just annoy a lot of users, unless there's something really amazing about the change. Even then, people are hesitant to like new UIs. Engineers and designers definitely want to try new things, but balancing those against messing with UIs that a billion+ people use is hard. My general take on drive and calendar, if they are trying to imp…

Calendar is great; but I wish it would let me edit an event the same way I can quick-enter one; from a pop-up. I'm half-inclined to write a browser ext to do it.

Also the latest updates to Sheets in the menubars have been welcome

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